Why gillard always gets it wrong

Compared to that, shifting positions on a price on carbon is small potatoes. Stripped of all the self-justifying nonsense used to maintain the rage that currently fills our newspapers and airwaves, there are three pertinent distinctions between this government and the Howard Government: it is a Labor Government, it is a minority government, and the current prime minister is a woman.

Being a Labor government not only alienates the dominant right-wing media, it brings business into public discussion in a way that simply never happens with a Coalition government. Bad behaviour by Howard was excused by a phalanx of media apologists. Policy disagreements that would have been discussed in backrooms with a Coalition government are now made the subject of multimillion dollar advertising campaigns. The hung parliament forces the government into deal making that is nearly always interpreted as weakness by the media, and they also tend to preference stability interpreted as 'strength' over achievement.

The buzzword is 'authority'. Gillard being a woman means she is judged by a different standard, and let's not pretend otherwise. It may not be a decisive matter, but it is one that shifts the balance of interpretation. When she is tough, she is seen as treacherous and unbecoming. When she prefers compromise and negotiation, she is seen as weak.

Oh yeah, and she doesn't have kids: how can she relate to 'normal' people? The Gillard Government is far from perfect, and ultimately has no-one to blame for its poor standing but itself.

All I'm trying to put my finger on is why their bad behaviour is deemed so much more unacceptable than the bad behaviour of the previous Coalition government. Those three reasons are key. View his full profile here. We acknowledge Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as the First Australians and Traditional Custodians of the lands where we live, learn, and work.

Violent metaphors dominate the discussion of the Gillard Government. The same article put the PM's problems down, in part, to her not having had a baby, and offered this brilliant piece of analysis: Meanwhile Yes, that's right.

People are longing for the honesty of Tony Abbott. Oh, how times have changed! The change of narrative is simply extraordinary.

So what's going on? That anger propelled it. I thought it was a forceful speech because the opposition leaders had dropped their heads during it. But I had no sense of how it was going to resonate outside the parliamentary chamber.

But it was only over the next few days that it was reported around the world. Peter Hartcher for Fairfax , 10 October The moment Gillard rose to defend Slipper and keep him in office, she chose to defend the indefensible, to excuse the inexcusable. But when one of the bulwarks of the government was exposed as having a problem with women, it was suddenly acceptable. Dennis Shanahan for the Australian , 10 October Rather than taking the initiative and leaving Slipper to fall on his sword, Labor went to full-blooded battle and tried to make political gains in its obsessive war on the Liberal leader.

Jonathan Holmes for Media Watch , October The gallery, almost to a man and woman, focused on the hypocrisy, as they saw it, of Julia Gillard attacking Tony Abbott for sexism while defending Peter Slipper. I wish there was some intricate backstory. That day a man from another party whom I had supported to be speaker of the House of Representatives was unmasked as having sent some sexist text messages. When we got into question time in Parliament, the opposition leader, Tony Abbott, moved into the debate, and so, whilst he was speaking, I handwrote a reply.

It welled up. I got a blank piece of paper and just scribbled down words to help guide me from one point to another. That anger propelled it.

I thought it was a forceful speech because the opposition leaders had dropped their heads during it. But I had no sense of how it was going to resonate outside the parliamentary chamber. But it was only over the next few days that it was reported around the world. At first I was somewhere between confused and amused that it could get so big. Nowadays, with social media what it is, you might realize. But this was then. For a long period I stepped in behind the scenes as much as I could to try to make up for the deficits—even things like diary management, political communications, intermingling with his staff.

Whilst the workload was intense, it would have been sustainable provided there was a strong bond of trust between Kevin and me. But one fateful day some newspaper coverage indicated that even that had fallen away on his side. So there has to be change. You stayed quiet for so long about those pressures and your reasons for challenging Rudd. Well, when I became prime minister, we needed to get ready to fight an election, and I wanted it to be about the big things we believed in and would do as a Labor Party, not about internal matters.

Unfortunately, there were several big leaks during the campaign—distorted versions of internal discussions—which kept hijacking the agenda. There was some shock about how I emerged, and all sorts of static around being the first woman prime minister. But I wanted to form a government and get on with governing.

Why did you back away from it? My underlying beliefs never changed. Climate change is real, we have to address it, and the best way to do that is through market-based mechanisms. And what prevented Kevin Rudd from succeeding with the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme was the inability to get it through the Senate. The Conservatives were opposed to it; the Greens refused to support it. In the days of our minority government there was a window to get an emissions trading scheme instead, and we went for it.

After you lost the leadership challenge, why did you leave politics? I said that if I lost, I would. I thought it should be a clean decision.